中文
By Xin Ping
For those who deceive themselves in an attempt to stay away from danger or escape from reality, English speakers may say "bury one's head in the sand like an ostrich", while the Chinese will probably say "to plug one's ears while stealing a bell", an idiom that refers sarcastically to the ignorance and foolishness of the perpetrator.
For every sane person, it's such a foolish attempt to escape from one's wrongdoing with self-cheating excuses. If a country habitually acts in a similar way, however, it cannot be explained by ignorance or stupidity; it is about the hubris and recklessness, and single-minded pursuit of its own political agenda and interests at the expense of global security and public interests.
As the calls for search for the origins of SARS-CoV-2 in the U.S. are mounting, the U.S. government sticks to its "arrogance of ignorance" by playing deaf, despite many circumstantial, testimonial and forensic evidences have revealed that a thorough investigation of its bio-labs could offer clues to the virus origins.
"Vials of bio-terror bacteria have gone missing. Lab mice infected with deadly viruses have escaped, and wild rodents have been found making nests with research waste. Cattle infected in a university's vaccine experiments were repeatedly sent to slaughter and their meat sold for human consumption. Gear meant to protect lab workers from lethal viruses such as Ebola and bird flu has failed, repeatedly."
These horrific scenes, brought to light by a USA TODAY Network investigation in 2015, have occurred at U.S. bio-labs coast to coast in recent years. Similar incidents have happened at U.S. labs in other countries as well.
Media reports reveal that the U.S. has deployed over 200 bio-labs in 25 countries and regions in the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia and countries of the former Soviet Union. Some places where the bio-labs are based have seen large-scale outbreaks of measles, anthrax, atypical pneumonia, MERS and other dangerous infectious diseases. Some of the bio-labs are even suspected to collect pathogen samples for biological weapon developments.
In 2015, the U.S. military accidentally shipped live samples of anthrax from Utah to civilian commercial labs in nine states and a military lab in South Korea. 22 personnel at Osan Air Force Base outside of Seoul were exposed to the deadly bacteria shipped from the U.S. Army's Dugway Proving Ground in Utah.
The similar "accident" reoccurred in August 2019 when U.S. military carried coronavirus to Europe through Armed Services Blood Program (ASBP), and civilian volunteers entering the U.S. base in Italy became the earliest victims, according to the report by the WorldNews (WN) Network.
In 2018, the journal Science published an article titled "Agricultural research, or a new bioweapon system?", questioning the U.S. military's investigation on the possibility of deploying insects to make plants more resilient by altering their genes, and requiring the U.S. to provide greater justification for the peace-time purpose of its Insect Allies project. Scientists suspect that this type of system could be more easily developed for use as a biological weapon than for the agricultural purpose.
In May 2020, a private Kazakh website Ehonews.kz suggested the U.S. military biological facilities in Almaty and Otar have been collecting dangerous viruses for developing bio-weapons against countries such as Russia and China.
Amirbek Togusov, former deputy defence minister of Kazakhstan, wrote shortly before his death, that "We are becoming experimental monkeys, and the unique territory is the Pentagon's natural testing ground for testing new viruses… As a rule, such laboratories built by the U.S. military are removed from national control and operate in a secret regime..."
Myriad of problems and dangers at U.S. bio-labs obviously cannot be attributed to mistakes and lethargy only. They should serve as a wake-up call about something the biosecurity and public health community has been banging the drum about for years: what the U.S. has been engaging in its secretive bio-labs domestically and overseas is posing a significant threat to safety and security of Americans and global public health.
China has just submitted to the World Health Organization (WHO) two non-papers on Fort Detrick and the University of North Carolina (UNC), as well as an open letter signed by netizens demanding an investigation into Fort Detrick. It's only reasonable to seek an explanation from the U.S. and prompt a WHO-led field investigation into and closer scrutiny of those two highly suspicious locations and other possible centers of contagion.
The author is a commentator on international affairs, writing regularly for CGTN, Global Times, China Daily, etc.
